For more than two millennia prior to the arrival of Islam, Yemen was the home of a series of powerful and wealthy city-states and empires whose prosperity was largely based upon their control over the production of frankincense and myrrh, two of the most highly prized commodities of the ancient world, and their exclusive access to such non-Yemeni luxury commodities as various spices and condiments from southern Asia and ostrich plumes and ivory from eastern Africa. The three most famous and largest of these empires were the Minaean (Maʿīn), the Sabaean (Sabaʾ, the biblical Sheba), and the Ḥimyarite (Ḥimyar, called Homeritae by the Romans), all of which were known throughout the ancient Mediterranean world; their periods of ascendancy overlap somewhat, extending from roughly 1200 BCE to 525 CE.

The Romans began expanding their power and influence to the Red Sea in the 1st century CE and soon learned the secrets of the Yemeni traders—namely, the true source of luxury commodities provided by the Yemenis and how to exploit the monsoon winds to traffic between Red Sea ports and those of southern Asia and eastern Africa, where these treasures could be found. It was only a matter of time before Yemen, unable to compete effectively against imperial Rome, went into economic decline, and the subsequent loss of revenue made it impossible for Yemen to maintain its extensive cities and attendant facilities. The most famous instance was the failure to maintain the Great Dam at Maʾrib—the heart of a monumental irrigation project and one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. Its rupture sometime in the 6th century CE constitutes the symbolic end to the long era of the Yemeni trading kingdoms.

The last Ḥimyarite king, Dhū Nuwās (Yūsuf Ashʿar; c. 6th century CE), was a convert to Judaism who carried out a major massacre of the Christian population of Yemen. The survivors called for aid from the Byzantine emperor, who arranged to have an army from the Christian kingdom of Aksum (in what is now Ethiopia) invade Yemen in order to punish Dhū Nuwās. The leader of the Aksumite campaign was Abraha. After overthrowing Dhū Nuwās and conducting a massacre of Jews, Abraha stayed on to rule the Yemen. His attempt to extend his rule farther north, into the Hejaz (the western coastal region of the Arabian Peninsula), was ultimately a failure, though his effort to besiege Mecca is reported in the Qurʾān.

The Ḥimyarites grew resentful of the Aksumites, who they came to view as usurpers, and sought the support of the Sāsānian dynasty of Persia to expel them. By obliging, the Persians added the satrapy of Yemen to their domains. The last Persian governor of Yemen apparently converted to Islam in 628 CE, accepting the political dominance of the Muslim community.

The advent of Islam

Islam spread readily and quickly in Yemen, perhaps because of the century of economic decline and the atrocious behaviour of both Jews and Christians during that time. The Prophet Muhammad sent his son-in-law as governor, and two of Yemen’s most famous mosques—that in Janadiyyah (near Taʿizz) and the Great Mosque in Sanaa (said to have incorporated some materials from earlier Jewish and Christian structures)—are thought to be among the earliest examples of Islamic architecture.

Despite the fact that Muhammad’s first successor, the caliph Abū Bakr (served 632–634), managed to unify the Arabian Peninsula, it was not long before Yemen once again demonstrated its fractious nature. Often when the caliph sent a representative to put down rebellions or deal with other problems, the representative would establish his own dynasty. Such was the case with Muḥammad ibn Ziyād, who early in the 9th century founded the city of Zabīd as his capital. (See Ziyādid dynasty.)

For the history of Yemen, however, the most important event after the triumph of Islam was the introduction in the 9th century of the Zaydī sect from Iraq—a group of Shīʿites who accepted Zayd ibn ʿAlī, a direct descendant of Muhammad, as the last legitimate successor to the Prophet. Much of Yemeni culture and civilization for the next 1,000 years was to bear the stamp of Zaydī Islam. That same span of time was host to a confusing series of factional, dynastic, local, and imperial rulers contesting against one another and against the Zaydīs for control of Yemen. Among them were the Ṣulayḥids and the Fāṭimids, who were Ismāʿīlīs (another Shīʿite branch); the Ayyūbids; and the Rasūlids, whose long rule (13th–15th century) firmly established Sunnism in southern and western Yemen.

Yemen next appeared on the world stage when, according to one account, the leader of a Sufi religious order discovered the stimulating properties of coffee as a beverage, probably about the beginning of the 15th century. As a result, Yemen and the Red Sea became an arena of conflict between the Egyptians, the Ottomans, and various European powers seeking control over the emerging market for Coffea arabica as well as over the long-standing trade in condiments and spices from the East; this conflict occupied most of the 16th and 17th centuries. By the beginning of the 18th century, however, the route between Europe and Asia around Africa had become the preferred one, and the world had once again lost interest in Yemen. In the meantime, the coffee plant had been smuggled out of Yemen and transplanted into a great variety of new and more-profitable locales, from Asia to the New World. The effect of the redirection of trade was dramatic: cities such as Aden and Mocha (as the name would suggest, once a major coffee centre), which had burgeoned with populations in excess of 10,000, shrank to villages of a few hundred.

The age of imperialism

Developments in the 19th century were fateful for Yemen. The determination of various European powers to establish a presence in the Middle East elicited an equally firm determination in other powers to thwart such efforts. For Yemen, the most important participants in the drama were the British, who took over Aden in 1839, and the Ottoman Empire, which at mid-century moved back into North Yemen, from which it had been driven by the Yemenis two centuries earlier. The interests and activities of these two powers in the Red Sea basin and Yemen were substantially intensified by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the reemergence of the Red Sea route as the preferred passage between Europe and East Asia. As the Ottomans expanded inland and established themselves in Sanaa and Taʿizz, the British expanded north and east from Aden, eventually establishing protectorates over more than a dozen of the many local statelets; this was done more in the interest of protecting Aden’s hinterland from the Ottomans and their Yemeni adversaries than out of any desire to add the territory and people there to the British Empire. By the early 20th century the growing clashes between the British and the Ottomans along the undemarcated border posed a serious problem; in 1904 a joint commission surveyed the border, and a treaty was concluded, establishing the frontier between Ottoman North Yemen and the British possessions in South Yemen. Later, of course, both Yemens considered the treaty an egregious instance of non-Yemeni interference in domestic affairs.

The north became independent at the end of World War I in 1918, with the departure of the Ottoman forces; the imam of the Zaydīs, Yaḥyā Maḥmūd al-Mutawwakil, became the de facto ruler in the north by virtue of his lengthy campaign against the Ottoman presence in Yemen. In the 1920s Imam Yaḥyā sought to consolidate his hold on the country by working to bring the Shāfiʿī areas under his administrative jurisdiction and by suppressing much of the intertribal feuding and tribal opposition to the imamate. In an effort to enhance the effectiveness of his campaigns against the tribes and other fractious elements, the imam sent a group of Yemeni youth to Iraq in the mid-1930s to learn modern military techniques and weaponry. These students would eventually become the kernel of domestic opposition to Yaḥyā and his policies.

Yemeni independence allowed the imam to resuscitate Zaydī claims to “historic Yemen,” which included Aden and the protectorate states, as well as an area farther north that had been occupied only recently by an expanding Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including the province of Asir and some important areas around the Najrān oasis and Jīzān. These areas became a point of conflict with the house of Saʿūd. Yaḥyā, of course, did not recognize the standing Anglo-Ottoman border agreement.

The British, on the other hand, retained control over the south, which they considered strategically and economically important to their empire. Friction between the imamate and Britain characterized the entire interwar period, as Imam Yaḥyā sought to include the south in the united Yemen that he perceived to be his patrimony. The British in the meantime were consolidating their position in the south. The most important change was the incorporation of the Ḥaḍramawt and its great valley into the protectorate system—the result of the labours of British diplomat Harold Ingrams, who negotiated the famous “Ingrams’s Peace” among the more than 1,400 tribes and clans that had been feuding in that district for decades.

By the end of World War II in 1945, dissatisfaction with Yaḥyā and his imamate had spread to a rather wide segment of Yemeni society, including both secular and Muslim reformers and modernists, other elements of the traditional elite, and even the ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars). This tide of dissent culminated in early 1948 in the assassination of Yaḥyā and a coup by a varied coalition of dissidents. Much to the consternation of the plotters, however, Yaḥyā’s son Aḥmad succeeded in bringing together many of the tribal elements of the north, overthrew the new government, and installed himself as imam. Although Imam Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā had indicated that he supported many of the popular political, economic, and social demands (e.g., creation of a cabinet with real responsibilities, abandonment of the principle of economic autarky, and the establishment of free public education), his own government soon resembled his father’s in nearly all respects. An attempt on Aḥmad’s life in 1955 only increased repression; indeed, his paranoia concerning the loyalty of major tribal elements prompted actions that eventually cost his son tribal support during the civil war after the 1962 revolution.

In the meantime, the policies of both imams had backfired in the south. Although they had the advantage of offering an indigenous Muslim regime as an alternative to secular British rule, the imams’ aggressive policies had alarmed many of the ruling families of the statelets in the south. The latter now believed, probably correctly, that, if their small statelets were to be taken over by the imam, their perquisites and status would be curtailed if not eliminated. Consequently, most deemed it advantageous to cooperate more closely with Britain, which, after all, subsidized them and implied a role for them in future arrangements. By the late 1950s an earlier proposal to federate some of the smaller statelets had grown into a much broader scheme to include all the principalities and sheikhdoms in a larger political entity that would eventually achieve independence.

Britain’s insistence that Aden be a part of the new entity created the anomaly that eventually killed the plan. The sophisticated business community, the activist trade unions, and other similarly modern political and social organizations in Aden feared for their future at the hands of what they perceived to be a group of largely illiterate and parochial tribal leaders from the backward rural protectorates. The tribal leaders, on the other hand, feared at worst their overthrow or at best a degree of political and economic participation severely limited by an Adeni population that included some non-Muslims and many non-Arabs.

The British continued to insist upon their chosen course of action, and by 1965 all but 4 of the 21 protectorate states had joined the Federation of South Arabia. Shortly thereafter, Britain announced that it would leave southern Arabia and that independence would ensue no later than 1968. This announcement unleashed the violent political conflict that prevailed in Aden and the protectorates for the next two years as sundry organizations fought for control of the destiny of South Yemen.

Two Yemeni states

In the north, meanwhile, Aḥmad died of natural causes in September 1962, and his son Muḥammad al-Badr became imam. Within a week, elements of the military, supported by a variety of political organizations, staged a coup and declared the foundation of the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen). The young imam escaped from his battered palace, fled into the northern highlands, and began the traditional process of rallying the tribes to his cause. The new republic called upon Egypt for assistance, and Egyptian troops and equipment arrived almost immediately to defend the new regime of ʿAbd Allāh al-Sallāl, the nominal leader of the 1962 revolution and the first president of North Yemen. Nearly as quickly, Saudi Arabia provided aid and sanctuary to the imam and his largely tribal royalist forces.

The establishment of a republic in North Yemen provided a tremendous incentive to the elements in the south that sought to eliminate the British presence there. Furthermore, the Egyptians agreed to provide support for some of the organizations campaigning for southern independence—e.g., the Front for the Liberation of (Occupied) South Yemen (FLOSY). However, not all elements in either of the two Yemens were sympathetic to Egyptian policies, much less to the dominant role that Egypt had begun to play in southern Arabia. A new, radical alternative movement, the National Liberation Front (NLF), drew its support primarily from indigenous elements in the south. As the time for independence drew near, the conflict between the various groups, and especially between the NLF and FLOSY, escalated into open warfare for the right to govern after British withdrawal. By late 1967 the NLF clearly had the upper hand; the British finally accepted the inevitable and arranged the transfer of sovereignty to the NLF on Nov. 30, 1967.

The new government in Aden renamed the country the People’s Republic of South Yemen. Short of resources and unable to obtain any significant amounts of aid, either from the Western states or from those in the Arab world, it began to drift toward the Soviet Union, which eagerly provided economic and technical assistance in hopes of bringing an Arab state into its political sphere. By the early 1970s South Yemen had become an avowedly Marxist state and had inaugurated a radical restructuring of the economy and society along communist lines, renaming itself the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.

In North Yemen the conflict between the imam’s royalist forces and the republicans had escalated into a full-blown civil war that continued fitfully and tragically until 1970. Participation, however, was not limited to the Yemenis: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Jordan supported the royalists, whereas Egypt and the Soviet Union and other Eastern-bloc states supported the republicans. Britain and the United States, as well as the United Nations, also eventually became major players, even if only at the diplomatic level. By the late 1960s, however, the Yemenis decided that the only logical outcome of the conflict was a compromise, which would have as its most important side effect the departure of the various foreign forces. Al-Sallāl’s pro-Egyptian regime was ousted in a bloodless coup in 1968 and replaced by a nominally civilian one headed by Pres. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Iryānī. Two years later, with the blessing of the two major foreign participants—Egypt and Saudi Arabia—the leaders of North Yemen agreed upon the Compromise of 1970, which established a republican government in which some major positions were assigned to members of the royalist faction. It was agreed that the imam and his family were not to return to Yemen or to play any role whatsoever in the new state; accordingly, the imam went into exile in Britain and died there in the late 1990s.

The compromise government embarked haltingly upon a program of political and economic development, with few resources and even fewer skilled personnel to implement the desired changes. Impatient, the military and some tribal elements dismissed the civilian cabinet in 1974 and replaced it with a military-led Command Council headed by Ibrāhīm al-Ḥamdī, who appointed a cabinet largely composed of technocrats. That government slowly but surely began to build a set of more-modern institutions and to implement the beginnings of a program of development—at the local as well as the national level. Not all sectors of the population, however, accepted the government’s new powers and influence over traditional political, economic, and social relationships. A clear indication of this discontent was the assassination of two presidents in rapid succession (al-Ḥamdī in 1977 and, only eight months later, Aḥmad al-Ghashmī in 1978). The People’s Constituent Assembly, which had been created somewhat earlier, selected Col. ʿAlī ʿAbd Allāh Ṣāliḥ as al-Ghashmī’s successor. Despite early public skepticism and a serious coup attempt in late 1978, Ṣāliḥ managed to conciliate most factions, to improve relations with Yemen’s neighbours, and to resume various programs of economic and political development and institutionalization. More firmly in power in the 1980s, he created the political organization that was to become known as his party, the General People’s Congress (GPC), and steered Yemen into the age of oil.

Now that the two Yemens were independent, expectations rose in some quarters that there would be some form of unification, especially since both states publicly claimed to support the idea. Such was not forthcoming, however, the primary reason being the drastic divergence of political and socioeconomic orientations of the two regimes by the end of the 1960s. Whereas the north elected to remain a mixed but largely market economy and to retain ties with the West as well as with Saudi Arabia, the south began to move rapidly in a socialist direction under the leadership of the more radical wing of the NLF.

Political differences led to a brief border war between the two Yemens in 1972. Notwithstanding efforts by some Yemenis and by others to resolve these disputes—indeed, despite the first of two aborted agreements to unify—the basic conflicts appeared irreconcilable. The South Yemenis perceived their cause, that of Marxist transformation of the Arab political, economic, and social systems, to be in desperate need of direct action. In fact, South Yemen helped to instigate and fund a broad-based opposition movement in the north, the National Democratic Front, in the mid-1970s; elements of the leadership sanctioned the assassination of the North Yemeni president, al-Ghashmī, in 1978. At the same time, South Yemen supported other revolutionary organizations in the region, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman. The continuing friction between the two Yemens led to another brief but more serious border war in 1979; as in the previous case, that conflict was followed by a short-lived agreement to unify.

All the while, however, significant fissures—both ideological and practical—were opening in South Yemen within the ruling Yemen Socialist Party (YSP), the party that evolved out of the NLF. ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Ismāʿīl was the major ideologue of the YSP, as well as head of state and the driving force behind South Yemen’s move toward the Soviet Union earlier in the 1970s. Late in that decade, he was opposed by his former ally and leader of the “Chinese faction” in the regime, South Yemen president Sālim ʿAlī Rubayyī, whose visit to China inspired his politics with Maoist ideas. The conflict ended in Rubayyī’s execution on charges that he had been behind the assassination of al-Ghashmī.

In turn, Ismāʿīl proved too dogmatic and rigid—in his analyses, policies, and methods of implementation—and was deposed in 1980. His successor, ʿAlī Nāṣir Muḥammad, instituted a far less dogmatic political and economic order. In January 1986 the various personal and ideological differences surfaced briefly in an episode of violent civil strife that left Ismāʿīl and many of his supporters dead, resulted in the exile of ʿAlī Nāṣir Muḥammad, and brought to power a group of moderate politicians and technocrats led by ʿAlī Sālim al-Bayḍ and Ḥaydar Abū Bakr al-ʿAṭṭas. It was this element of the YSP that undertook the negotiations that brought about the unity of the two Yemens. The ability of the new leadership to build popular political support and to revive the faltering development of South Yemen was tested in the late 1980s—and it was found wanting.

Unification of Yemen

Two factors made the unity agreement of 1990 possible: (1) the discovery of oil and natural gas in both countries at roughly the same time and in roughly the same geographic region (from Maʾrib to Shabwah), some of which was in dispute between them (clearly, it would not have been in the best interest of either country to engage in a costly conflict over such important resources; it made far more sense to unite and share the profits to be gained from a rational exploitation of the deposits), and (2) the decision by Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, to abandon that country’s support of the governments and policies of a number of eastern European states, some of which were South Yemen’s principal sources of financial, technical, and personnel assistance. Once the communist bloc gave way to popular democratic movements, it was only a matter of time before the isolated South Yemeni regime would crumble. The rational option for the YSP—and the one it chose—was to enter into negotiations with North Yemen while still in power.

Inasmuch as the border wars of 1972 and 1979 each had concluded with unification agreements that, unsurprisingly, were aborted in a matter of months, the decision by the two ruling parties in late November 1989 to unify the two states—and, more importantly, its actual implementation six months later—took many Yemenis and nearly all outside observers by surprise. Whereas South Yemen had taken the lead in the past, this effort to unify was initiated and pushed by the Ṣāliḥ regime of North Yemen. Adopted by the legislatures of the two Yemens on May 22, 1990, the constitution of the new republic was declared in effect on that date.

The final terms of unification called for the full merger of the two states and the creation of a political system based on multiparty democracy. Sanaa was declared the political capital, and Aden was to be the economic capital. After a 30-month transition period, elections of a new national legislature were to take place in November 1992 (although ultimately they would be postponed). During the transition period, the two existing legislatures would meet together as a single body, and all other offices and powers would be shared equally between the two ruling parties, the GPC and the YSP. Ṣāliḥ was to serve as interim president of the republic and al-Bayḍ, the secretary-general of the YSP, was to be vice president.

Efforts by the Ṣāliḥ government to strengthen and build support and legitimacy for the political system of united Yemen were sorely compromised by an environment marked by severe economic collapse and widespread deprivation, especially since these conditions came quickly after a period of improving economic conditions and soaring expectations. Most of the population in the northern part of Yemen had experienced better living conditions in the 1980s, if not before, and the prospects of oil revenues and the reputed benefits of unification had greatly raised expectations in both parts of Yemen at the end of the 1980s.

The indirect cause of the collapse of the Yemeni economy can be found in the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), which followed Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990. The growing importance of oil revenues notwithstanding, the Yemeni economy in the late 1980s remained heavily dependent on workers’ remittances and external economic aid from Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the other oil-rich Persian Gulf states. In the fall of 1990, the newly created Republic of Yemen took the position that a diplomatic solution for Iraq’s aggression should be reached between the Arab countries. Yemen’s refusal to join the U.S.-Saudi military coalition against Iraq prompted Saudi Arabia to expel several hundred thousand Yemeni workers and to cut all foreign aid to Yemen; most of the other Arab oil states followed suit. Within months, the republic’s gross domestic product and government revenues—to which external aid contributed significantly—plunged; the unemployment and inflation rates, as well as the budget deficit, soared. By 1992, general contraction of the economy had produced widespread and deepening privation, and modest increases in oil revenues did not add much to the capacity of the new government to ease the growing suffering and to stem the collapse of the economy.

With the economy ailing, spats of political violence, including bombings and assassinations, marred the years leading to the republic’s first general parliamentary elections. Despite the growing acrimony, however, the unification regime was able to pull back from the political brink and hold the prescribed legislative elections in April 1993, only a few months later than originally planned; they were judged by international monitors to be relatively free and fair. President Ṣāliḥ’s party, the GPC, emerged with a large plurality of seats. The Islamic Reform Grouping (Iṣlāḥ), the main organized opposition to the unification regime since 1990, and the YSP both won strong minority representation. Holding virtually all the seats, the three parties formed a coalition government in May 1993, amid some hope that the political crisis had passed.

Civil war and political unrest

Instead, the conflict between the northern and southern political leaders worsened dramatically in the second half of 1993 and the early months of 1994. For the second time in little more than a year, Vice President al-Bayḍ left Sanaa and retired to Aden, taking many of his YSP colleagues with him. Despite major efforts at reconciliation, from within and without Yemen, the political struggle escalated into armed conflict in the spring of 1994, and YSP leaders and other southern politicians—still in control of their armed forces—resorted to armed secession in the early summer of that year. The War of Secession of 1994, lasting from May to early July, resulted in the defeat of the southern forces and the flight into exile of most of the YSP leaders and their soldiers and other supporters.

The short civil war left the YSP in political shambles and left control of the state in united Yemen in the hands of a GPC-Iṣlāḥ coalition dominated by President Ṣāliḥ. Over the next few years, the effort to reorganize politics and to strengthen the voice of the south in Yemen’s political life was hampered in part by the inability of the YSP to resuscitate itself; at the same time, strained relations within the GPC-Iṣlāḥ coalition led to increasing dominance by the GPC and to an oppositional stance on Iṣlāḥ’s part. The political conflict and unrest that accompanied and followed the civil war led to a revival of the power of the security forces and to the curtailment of the freedom of opposition parties, the media, and nongovernmental organizations. Human rights were being violated, but those violations were increasingly protested by groups within Yemen.

Yemen held its second parliamentary election on April 27, 1997. The GPC won a majority of the seats, Iṣlāḥ finished second, and the YSP virtually committed political suicide by boycotting the elections. Given its sizable majority, the GPC chose to rule alone, thereby making Iṣlāḥ the major opposition party in parliament. In late 1994 the plural executive had been abolished and President Ṣāliḥ reelected to a five-year term by parliament. In September 1999 he was again returned to office, this time in the country’s first direct presidential elections and for a term lengthened to seven years. He had run virtually unopposed, as the YSP candidate was unable to secure the minimum number of votes necessary in the GPC-dominated parliament to stand in the election.

By late 1994 the economy of unified Yemen was in free fall, primarily the result of the loss of remittances and external aid after 1990 and, to a lesser extent, the costs of unification and the War of Secession. Rapidly increasing oil revenues notwithstanding, Yemen had ceased to be economically viable or sustainable. By 1995 it was clear to key leaders in the Ṣāliḥ regime that economic realities required greatly increased foreign investment and aid and that, in turn, these would not be forthcoming without a stabilized and restructured economy and a peaceful external environment.

Territorial disputes

The Ṣāliḥ regime realized its undemarcated border with Saudi Arabia remained the major source of regional conflict—and even war—for Yemen; thus the restoration of good relations with the Saudis and the resolution of the border issue were at the top of the Ṣāliḥ regime’s foreign policy agenda. Its attention focused on its relations with the Saudis and the other oil-rich Persian Gulf states, the Ṣāliḥ regime was waylaid by a dispute in 1995 with newly independent Eritrea. At issue was possession of the Ḥanīsh Islands, a string of tiny islands in the Red Sea between the two countries. When Eritrea initiated conflict over Greater Ḥanīsh and captured Yemeni forces, the possibility of escalation into war became real. Yemen, concerned about frightening off investors, signed an agreement with Eritrea pledging to submit the dispute to international arbitration. In 1998 the arbitration board awarded most of the Ḥanīsh Islands to Yemen, and both sides accepted the ruling. Although relations between Yemen and Eritrea improved initially, they were often strained over the next decade.

The Eritrean conflict notwithstanding, relations with Saudi Arabia remained Yemen’s primary external concern. Saudi pressure on Yemen’s eastern border included threats to international oil companies working under agreements with Yemen in territory claimed by the Saudis. This pressure and a border clash in late 1994—the first of a string of such clashes over the next several years—spurred talks between Yemen and Saudi Arabia that led to the Memorandum of Understanding in January 1995. The agreement called for negotiations to finally determine the border and reaffirmed the Ṭāʾif treaty of 1934, which had both conditionally assigned the disputed territories of Asir, Najrān, and Jīzān to Saudi Arabia and confirmed the right of either country to resort to international arbitration if negotiations failed. After many rounds of talks and a Yemeni threat to resort to arbitration, in June 2000 Yemen and Saudi Arabia signed the long-sought final border agreement, increasing greatly the potential for friendly, mutually beneficial relations between the two countries. For Yemen, the major potential benefits were economic aid and the opportunity for Yemeni workers to once again seek employment in oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Economic challenges

Faced with the economic collapse of a country whose GDP in 1995 was half that of 1990, the Ṣāliḥ regime addressed the economic situation with a sense of urgency. From 1995 through most of the first decade of the new millennium, the regime’s efforts to restore the viability and sustainability of Yemen’s economy turned largely on the ambitious, multistage IMF and World Bank package of reforms first agreed to by the Ṣāliḥ regime in 1995. The package consisted of a series of stabilization measures and major structural reforms—and the relevant governance reforms—that Yemen pledged to implement over the course of a decade in exchange for generous amounts of aid, both from those international bodies and from many other external sources. One major goal was to make Yemen an attractive target for much-needed foreign investment. Parallel (but secondary) to this was the effort to further exploit Yemen’s limited oil resources and to begin taking advantage of its also-limited natural gas deposits.

The Ṣāliḥ regime successfully implemented the initial steps of the IMF and World Bank reform package over the last half of the 1990s. These included currency, budget, and trade reforms, all of which involved economic sacrifices to varying degrees by all sectors of the population. However, by the late 1990s the Ṣāliḥ regime demonstrated an increasing lack of will and capacity—mostly political capacity—to adopt and carry out the more demanding economic and governance measures in the package. As a result—and despite threats and some punitive actions by the IMF, the World Bank, and members of the donor community—little progress was made after 2000 in putting into place the reforms needed to attract investors to Yemen, create jobs, foster enterprise, and add to the GDP. Despite gains in the second half of the 1990s, the economy soon plateaued at a low level and by 2005 was barely creating enough jobs and necessary public services to keep up with the country’s rapid population growth. Unemployment remained high, as did the level of malnourishment and the proportion of the population living below the poverty line. As a result, Yemen’s economic situation and prospects in the first decade of the 21st century were grim.

Behind the Ṣāliḥ regime’s apparent lack of the will and capacity to do what was necessary for its survival was the very nature of that regime. In the 1980s the Ṣāliḥ regime in North Yemen had gradually crystallized into an oligarchy dominated by military officers, tribal sheikhs, and northern businessmen. Compromised somewhat by the politics of unification, this pyramid of patronage and privilege reasserted and extended itself after 1994; part of the extension involved the “occupation” of the south by northerners, especially military and security officers. Moreover, this “rule by the few” increasingly evolved into a special kind of oligarchy, a kleptocracy, in which the state—with only recent access to oil revenues and increased external aid—functioned primarily to enrich the oligarchs at the expense of the wider public. For the first time, the Yemeni state became a collection of profit centres for the rulers and their associates. Patronage, nepotism, bribery, fraud, and other corrupt practices became the norm rapidly and to an alarming degree.

Yemen and the “war on terror”

The nature and salience of Yemen’s relations with many countries—but especially the United States—changed dramatically with al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the change in relations with the United States was anticipated in the reactions by both countries to the suicide bombing by al-Qaeda of a U.S. naval destroyer, the USS Cole, in Aden’s port nearly a year earlier. Following terrorist bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the rise of Islamic militants in nearby Somalia, the USS Cole incident brought the issue of militant Islam into relation with Yemen. President Ṣāliḥ’s trip to Washington only days after the September 11 attacks to pledge Yemen’s full support to U.S. President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” notwithstanding, Ṣāliḥ thereafter had to balance the U.S. demand for no less than full support in the war against the realities of a domestic political landscape marked by Yemeni nationalism, strong Islamic sensibilities, growing anti-American sentiment, and—perhaps most importantly—the central role of some Yemeni militant Islamist leaders and groups in Yemen’s domestic political balance of power. From the USS Cole bombing, and especially after the September 11 attacks, President Ṣāliḥ picked his way carefully, but imperfectly and with difficulty, between these often contradictory forces.

Yemen’s link to revolutionary political Islam runs deeper than the USS Cole bombing and events in eastern Africa—or than the fact that the father of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden immigrated to Saudi Arabia from Wadi Ḥaḍramawt in Yemen. Many of the recruits for the U.S.- and Saudi-orchestrated effort to mount a largely Islamic effort to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s came from Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s neighbour (see Afghan War). In the course of this effort, Afghanistan became the main incubator for this new phenomenon: global revolutionary Islam. When a collapsing Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan after 1989, trained and radicalized fighters from throughout the Islamic world made their way home. Specifically, many fighters—both Yemeni and non-Yemeni—went to Yemen, drawn by its porous borders and its vast tribal areas outside the control of the Yemeni state. Thereafter, many of the Yemeni returnees, called “Afghan-Arabs,” fought on the side of the Ṣāliḥ regime in the War of Secession in 1994. Indeed, the regime became indebted to some of them, and some developed close ties to the regime’s topmost leaders.

Despite both the domestic political problems posed by the war on terror and the unwillingness of the Yemeni oligarchs to adopt reforms that might restore economic viability and address the increasingly desperate condition of most Yemenis, the GPC engineered a big majority in the parliamentary elections in 2003. While Iṣlāḥ remained the only significant opposition party, the YSP did make something of a comeback. By this time, however, the YSP and Iṣlāḥ had joined with the Nasserites and two small Zaydī parties in an increasingly united and assertive opposition coalition, the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP). In 2006 President Ṣāliḥ again decisively won a new seven-year term, despite the relatively good showing by the candidate of the JMP; the GPC was also successful in the local council elections that were held at the same time. The JMP remained intact after the elections, maintaining a unified opposition to the Ṣāliḥ regime and at the same time planning for the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.

Mounting challenge to the Ṣāliḥ regime

The conflicting demands of the war on terror and the myriad problems facing Yemen’s economy and society—and, in both areas, things done and left undone by the Ṣāliḥ regime—cumulatively increased resentment and dissatisfaction throughout Yemen in the 2000s. The al-Ḥūthī (al-Houthi) Rebellion, launched in June 2004 in Ṣaʿdah in the far north by Zaydī sayyids who initially expressed their more general discontent by condemning the Ṣāliḥ regime as pro-American and pro-Israeli, resulted in many casualties over the next three months. In part as a result of the regime’s heavy-handed response, the rebellion continued to re-erupt and defied third-party efforts to reach a truce.

Beginning in mid-2007, an epidemic of protests and demonstrations, some of them violent, broke out over many months and in a large number of places across southern Yemen. Initiated by disgruntled military officers protesting their forced retirement and meagre pensions, these actions—and the regime’s oftentimes harsh response—soon spread to civil servants, lawyers, teachers, professors, and unemployed youths protesting what they saw as the systematic discrimination against the south since the end of the War of Secession in 1994.

The rebellion in the north and the protests in the south evolved into questions of the legitimacy of the Ṣāliḥ regime, Yemeni unification, and even republicanism itself. Some protesting southerners, moving beyond the claim that unification amounted to occupation, openly began questioning again the notion of Yemeni unification. Even more crucially, some supporters of the al-Ḥūthī rebellion questioned republicanism itself and explicitly called for the restoration of the imamate and rule by Zaydī sayyids.

In addition, a number of bombings occurred in the diplomatic quarter of Sanaa in early 2008, at about the time that al-Qaeda called upon its Yemeni supporters to focus attacks on the western “crusaders” and their Yemeni allies. The bombing at the entrance of the U.S. embassy on September 17, in which some 16 people died, was only the worst of a string of violent incidents claimed by, or blamed on, al-Qaeda and its allies. The Ṣāliḥ regime’s responses to this and other acts were swift and harsh. Thus, by late 2008, the legitimacy and continuation of the Ṣāliḥ regime, and even Yemen itself, were being challenged in the north, east, south, and centre—in effect, from just about all quarters.

In late January 2011—after a popular uprising in Tunisia, known as the Jasmine Revolution, had forced Pres. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from power, inspiring similar protests in Egypt—thousands of protesters gathered in Sanaa and several other Yemeni cities to call on Ṣāliḥ to step down as president. The protesters chanted pro-democracy slogans and condemned poverty and official corruption. Unlike the Egyptian and Tunisian protests, which seemed to have little centralized leadership, protests in Yemen appeared to have been organized and directed by a coalition of Yemeni opposition groups. The Yemeni demonstrations proceeded with little violence between protesters and security forces. In response to the demonstrations, Ṣāliḥ made several economic concessions, including a reduction in income taxes and an increase in the salaries for government employees. In February he promised not to stand for reelection when his current term ended in 2013, and he vowed that his son would not succeed him in office. The move failed to placate protesters, who noted that Ṣāliḥ had reneged on a previous promise not to seek reelection in 2006.